Ever-annoying Andy Kaufman gets last laugh

The first time I saw the late Andy Kaufman, playing Latka Gravas on the '70s sitcom Taxi, I found him annoying.

Right response. Wrong reason.

Latka was annoying because he was so cloying, a sweet-natured, child-like innocent on a show that spent too much time pursuing sighs and not enough time pursuing belly laughs.

I preferred Danny DeVito's mean-spirited Louis De Palma, presiding over the taxi barn like some minor demon assigned to supervise a forgotten corner of hell.

It wasn't until I read a magazine profile of Kaufman a couple of years later (circa 1980) that I realized how far removed Kaufman's comic sensibility was from the Gump-like Gravas.

The profile began with a long description of a nightclub performance in which Kaufman's act consisted of singing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, all 99 verses.

That, I thought, is very funny. Funny to read about. To actually sit through it would have been very annoying. Which was apparently the point.

The new movie Man on the Moon, in which Jim Carrey does an eerily brilliant impersonation, does not capture Kaufman's essential being, probably because Kaufman had no essential being.

But it does make it clear that whatever else mattered to Kaufman - he seemed largely immune to most normal human urges - the man loved to be annoying.

He collaborated with his writer/partner Bob Zmuda (played by Paul Giamatti) in a series of elaborate practical jokes upon the world. Each joke was like an onion: Peel back a layer and you got not to the core of the joke but to a new layer.

Kaufman invented an alterego named Tony Clifton, an obscenely sleazy and abrasive lounge singer who spent as much time insulting his audience as he did assaulting his material. When people began to catch on to the joke, Kaufman upped the ante by making appearances as himself while Zmuda did Clifton.

On a recent appearance on Inside the Actors Studio, Tim Robbins made the simple observation that every actor is obligated to give his best possible performance at all times simply because each audience is likely to include people for whom the price of the ticket was a sacrifice.

Kaufman's ethos could not have been more different. As his long-suffering agent (nicely played by DeVito, in a clever sort of joke within a joke) observes, most of Kaufman's jokes were aimed strictly at an audience of two: Kaufman and Zmuda. The audience served strictly as comic prop.

Nature finally played its own joke on Kaufman, a non-smoker who died of a rare form of lung cancer at 35, leaving many who knew him suspecting another Kaufman put-on. In fact, death was the rare intrusion of reality into the world of Andy Kaufman.

But Kaufman still gets the last laugh. He died a minor celebrity, shunned by most of show business and best known for a role he despised, Latka. Now Jim Carrey plays him in a movie and a generation that barely knows who Buster Keaton or Groucho Marx or Jack Benny were will celebrate Kaufman as a comic genius, unaware that the joke is ultimately on them.

Charlie Patton writes about the arts and popular culture for the Times-Union.